At the beginning of the project, we must ensure compliance with customer requirements and consistency of translation

• This year, we have successively processed more than 200,000-word projects for a certain technical and engineering client. The project lasted from the end of June to the present. At present, 15 batches of files have been translated. The languages involved are European, Asian, and Latin-Spanish. The end client is related to the navigation industry. They provide GPS tracking solutions to different vehicles. The original text involves a lot of codes, special symbols, abbreviations, etc.

  At the beginning of the project, the client only provided the official website and reference links and full form for some acronyms and gave a relatively short turnaround time. Since we made the appointment with the translators for each language before the project started, the translation of the first few batches of files went smoothly. After the delivery of the 14th batch of files, the customer raised a question about the translation: the texts in a special symbol should not be changed, just keep the original texts. After the change, it will affect the normal operation of some functions of the system. We urgently contacted the translators of the corresponding language files where the problem occurred and made targeted inspections and corrections. After finishing the appointment, translators in other languages will also check the translated files again to prevent the same problems from appearing.

  Soon after this feedback was submitted, the customer once again raised another similar question: the code composed of some special symbols cannot be changed. The discovery of the problem this time made the customer very anxious and even created a crisis of trust for us. Since the files in question this time corresponds to Latin-Spanish, the existence of the time difference made us have to delay the resolution of the feedback. After the second round of review of the files, we also discussed with the client the reason for their appearance. In addition to the errors made by the translators themselves in the translation process, since customers did not have clear requirements for such terms, we also ignored this issue in our internal QA.

  In order to prevent this problem from recurring in the new batch of files, our project manager and translators have screened all the special terms in the source files and submitted them to the customer for confirmation and compiled a glossary. Import the glossary into the CAT before the new batch of files is translated, so as to avoid the recurrence of such problems.

  Therefore, at the beginning of any project, we must confirm with customers whether there are special requirements for limited vocabulary, and establish a glossary as soon as possible to ensure compliance with customer requirements and consistency of translation.